


and the truth is a cave (on the mountain side)

by MashpotatoeQueen5



Category: The Rescuers (Movies), The Rescuers Down Under
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animals, Australia, Because I'm worth it, Birds, Childhood Trauma, Children, Cody's mum is just trying her best, Coming of Age, Coping, Endangered Species, Figuring Yourself Out, Gen, Growing Up, Happy Ending, Healing, Hunters & Hunting, It's my alternate universe and racism doesn't exist if I don't want it to, Kidnapping, Natural conservation, Nature, Percival McLeah is one evil dude, Post-Canon, Protectiveness, The Rescuers Down Under is a seriously underappreciated movie, The kid almost dies like, This fic is going to get like, Traumatized Children, Twelve notes max, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, WRITE THE STORIES YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD, You know why?, a half dozen times, and I think I'm actually okay with that, and deserves more fanfic, and this this story was born, but seriously this movie goes DEEP, don't want it to, there's gonna be scars, what a woman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:08:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24578062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MashpotatoeQueen5/pseuds/MashpotatoeQueen5
Summary: Cody grew up here, in this wilderness, the endless horizons and this warm cracked earth beneath his feet. He climbed trees and he counted wombats and he spent all the long hours he could scampering around in the hot Australian sun. He’d come out and play with his friends, could hardly wait a moment, and now-And now he stands at the front porch, backpack thrown over his shoulder and something small and tight in his chest, and watches the wavering stretches of heat rise off the ground.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 22





	and the truth is a cave (on the mountain side)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Truth is A Cave by The Oh Hellos
> 
> If you're reading this fic, I just want to let you know that I admire you for being a part of this truly minuscule fandom, and I hope you enjoy <3
> 
> Basically, I rewatched Rescuers Down Under yesterday, remembered why I absolutely adored it, and was then absolutely devastated over the lack of content.
> 
> Also I am a simple person: I see kids going through traumatic situations, I write them healing from traumatic situations. I don't know if I'm physically capable of not doing so. 
> 
> And thus, well, _this..._

Cody grew up here, in this wilderness, the endless horizons and this warm cracked earth beneath his feet. He climbed trees and he counted wombats and he spent all the long hours he could scampering around in the hot Australian sun. He’d come out and play with his friends, could hardly wait a moment, and now-

And now he stands at the front porch, backpack thrown over his shoulder and something small and tight in his chest, and watches the wavering stretches of heat rise off the ground.

“Cody?” his mum calls, and she sounds worried. She’s trying to hide it, the way her voice tears from her throat, but Cody can hear it, how the word catches. 

“What about your breakfast?” she asks, and it sounds just on the verge of pleading.

He stands at the brink of passing his front door, every muscle tensed and ready for action. He wants to  _ run,  _ to sprint out into that wild place and never come back. To find warm sun packed earth and curl up small and hidden and be untouched by all the world.

But he’s frozen stiff. Everything is locked up so tight. The sun is beating down and it feels like a weight.

“Cody?”

He licks his lips, curls his fingers. There are cuts from where the wire cage had nicked him, and slowly fading bruises from being tossed about like little more than a rag doll. There’s a boot mark on his wrist, imprinted from the weight of a grown man pressing down, irritating the rope burns splayed across his skin, healing in increments.

The first time his mother had seen him she had burst into tears.

It’s funny, but before-

Before McLeah, before everything, facing that endless horizon, it had been an escape. An escape from a home with no dad and an overworked mum. An escape from an isolated existence. He had taken small hands and he had  _ helped, _ found callouses from the grip of his swiss army knife, meaning in the way the animals chittered and nuzzled and talked with him, this kindness he uplifted all on his own. His dad had been a ranger, had given his life to protect the wilds, and he thought could do it, too.

It was freedom, out there. Cody found himself in the way the world breathed.

Now, looking out into that endless horizon, all he feels is small. 

Helpless.

He goes back in for breakfast.

He ends up stumbling into one of the ranger’s outlook posts, his three small friends curled up in the pocket of his shorts, a settling weight. He would have asked Marahute to take him all the way to his house, but she’s got her babies to care for, and there’s something inside of him screaming that no grown up should ever be trusted with her ever, ever again, and so he found his own way here.

Cody feels dirty. The flight had been so exhilarating, being  _ alive  _ had been so exhilarating, but now the excitement of it all has worn off and it's dark beneath the clouds hiding away the moon. His hair feels greasy and his clothing is ripped and torn, and his body aches from cuts and bruises and he’s so, so  _ tired. _

Marahute had given him another of her golden feathers, gripped in his fist too tight, crumpling the bristles. It’s a feather that got them all into this mess, and it feels wrong to hold it, feels important to hold it all the same.

All his emotions are jumbled up in his chest, too big and too much and consuming him whole. The rushing of the falls is still loud in his ears, hours later. 

“Knock on the door, kiddo,” the little hopping mouse says to him, and so he does.

There’s a rustle of fabric, the creaking of an old seat. The door swings wide and one of his dad’s old ranger friends looks down on him, the one who used to do magic tricks whenever she came over for dinner, and her eyes are bulging.

_ “Cody!?”  _ the woman nearly shouts, the other rangers in the small hut come running, and Cody starts crying.

There are too many emotions in his chest. He gets wrapped up in a blanket, gets pulled inside and rocked back and forth against someone’s side as other people make calls. Someone’s hushing him, trying to soothe him, but nothing is working and the tears just keep coming and coming and coming. He blubbers about poachers and cages and knives, about poor animals all locked up and chained and scared, about crocodiles and waterfalls and golden eagles soaring through the sky.

The mice riding along in his pocket say nothing.

_ “Shh, _ Cody,  _ shh,  _ you’re alright. We have you. You’re safe now.”

But he doesn’t feel safe. He doesn’t feel safe at all.

He doesn’t remember his dad much. 

Bits and pieces. Flashes. There had been a big scar on his thumb, and every time Cody had asked about it he had gotten a different story. His dad had been the one to teach him rock climbing, how to find your next handhold before relinquishing your last foothold, how to take it one step at a time. It had been his dad who had taught him about the outback, about the creatures who call it home, how to treat them with kindness and respect, to treat them as the wild living things they truly are.

But it had been his mum who had pulled apart traps and hissed  _ poachers  _ with bad words beneath her breath, who had ranted and raved about the law to his father on late evenings when they both thought he was asleep. She had also been the one who taught him how to use a knife, how to keep it angled away from you and keep your fingers safe.

Some small part of him wants to keep his swiss army knife on him all the time, now. He doesn’t feel safe without it clenched between his fingers, finds himself falling asleep with the blade tucked beneath his pillow.

But another part, a larger part, flinches at knives. Flinches at the  _ chop chop chop  _ of his mum cutting vegetables. He sits at the dining table and looks at the cooked chicken and remembers the flash of metal in the firelight, the solid  _ thunk  _ of a dagger landing mere inches from his head.

The meat before him is cooked. Coby thinks of Marahute, the way her eyes flashed and dilated when they were in that cage, the way she screeched and thrashed like an animal possessed, and it makes him feel sick.

“Mum,” he says, and his voice comes out too small in his throat, trapped and caged and broken, “I think I want to be a vegetarian.”

She pauses with her own meal, looks at him with a face that is so, so tired. Coby feels his own expression crumple, feels his own eyes grow wet, even though he doesn’t really know why, and she tuts and she reaches out to him, pulls him close onto her lap.

He’s glad he’s small enough for her to wrap around him entirely, glad that he can press into her side and hide his face in his shoulder. That she doesn’t shoo him away.

“Oh,  _ honey,” _ she whispers into his hair, and it’s just as soothing as Marahute’s golden beak.

The next time she comes back from the store, she's got cans of beans, and he musters up something like a smile.

The night terrors settle in some weeks after everything. He can’t remember his dreams, not really. They slip through his fingers like blades of grass on a windy day. There are flashes of gold and sneering grins. Gunshots, maybe, ringing in his ears. He wakes up with the faintest recollection of a troupe of evil clowns sifting through his brain, and he’s covered in sweat and his lungs rasp.

It doesn’t make any sense.

He feels cold all the time, too. Buried under blankets and under the baking sun, helping his mum set up the garden.

It has been cold in the cage, deep beneath the ground when the sun hid its weary head. Maybe the cold found him down in that cavern and crawled somewhere into bones, buried itself deep into his roots and made itself home.

Cody drags out his dad's old flannels and curls up in them on his hammock, knife in one hand and feather in the other, and doesn't sleep.

“Hun, you need to take a bath.”

It’s true. He’s caked in mud, in dust. He had played rugby with some of the boys down in the village, bare feet pounding on hard packed earth. It had rained earlier that day, and he sat by his window and watched it all fall down, had run out into the aftermath because the clouds blocked his view of that endless horizon. 

But the large silver tub that was always so much fun before seems so sinister now, the body of listless water staring him down. He feels shaky just looking at it, remembers the way the river had surged over his head, the snapping of crocodile mouths and the rushing of the falls, the sheer terrified realization that he was going to die.

The wild is a dangerous place. You step outside and it carries you away, and you never know when you might come back. 

“Cody?”

He shakes his head, shakes his whole body. There is something inside of him that is growing and growing and growing out of his control. The kids down on the field had been so nice, but they had nothing on the kindness of Faloo, on the stumbling grace of the wombats, on the way Marahute took him into the air and made him feel like so much more than his small skin and bones. 

But he hasn’t seen them in a week. Has stood frozen on his doorstep, trapped by all the endlessness that is the world outside of it, feeling microscopic and terrified in the face of a life that will always see him too clearly, that will always expand and overwhelm.

It used to be an escape. Now all it is is danger.

And it builds and it builds-

_ “Cody!” _

He feels like crying. The tears come quicker than they once did, like they’re always tucked away close to the surface and ready to run free ever since everything happened. He feels like a baby. He feels like a child.

Curling into himself just makes it easier to pick him up, but he does it anyway, because it feels better than standing and being exposed. Better than looking at the water in that tub, so still and silent and nothing like those raging currents. But the thought of dipping his head under still fills him with something like  _ panic. _

“I don’t want a  _ bath,”  _ he hiccups, and feels like an animal possessed, feels like the walls are closing in.

There is something wild inside of him, something feral. It is scraping and clawing and bursting, climbing up his throat like it is an endless cliff stretching high above, desperately gasping for open air. 

His mum curls on the ground next to him and doesn’t lift him back to his feet, knows better than to try. She hums and reaches out and pulls him close to her until they are curled together, two peas in a pod right there on the kitchen floor. The mud he’s wearing like armour is getting onto her dress, and she whispers meaning into the curve of his spine.

Later, she will wash his hair in the kitchen sink, and will spray him down with the garden hose. 

He’ll still feel dirty and grimy and cold. 

A week passes. Then two. Then another. It slips by in bursts and starts, drags on like an ever changing tide. Fast and slow and fast again. Cody watches it happen and paces the length of his room, watches it happen and helps his mum around the house, answers questions from the rangers and curls up in his hammock, feeling tired and drained and worn.

The bruises heal. The cuts scab over. He still doesn’t go out.

This wild thing inside his chest continues to grow.

He stands at his doorway and watches the endless horizon grow covered in clouds, watches the rain start pouring down, breathes, and steps out into it.

Wild living things, they are not meant to be caged.

He runs into the rain, feels himself get drenched in seconds, and keeps running on and on and on. He runs as the sky falls apart around him and weeps with the clouds. 

He runs.

His father had told him once, about this cycle of life and changes, about the giving nature of water and how it makes everything anew. Had told him about the grace that is dancing in the rain when your soul is heavy.

But Cody does not want to dance. He wants to run. He wants to run so fast and so far nothing will ever touch him again, wants to vanish into that wilderness and find himself home again. 

The rain comes pouring down, and he embraces it, mud slicked and teary eyed, winds buffering him on all sides. The world is this endless horizon and he is chasing it to a better tomorrow.

A flash of gold in a stormy sky, and suddenly Marahute is in view, flaring herself into existence. She looks ethereal, like this, an ancient goddess descending from on high, a flare of something untameable and wild and free before everything descends into rock, dust, and torrents of living water.

She is calling for him, calling for him, and Cody raises his hands and calls back to her, his voice still so small in his chest. How limited he is, in the face of this no man’s land, where the horizon stretches on forever and his hands can lift up so little from the rapids. How small he is, in comparison to her massive frame of light and gold.

_ (Small skin and small bones, how much of a difference can he truly make?) _

And still, and still, being swept away on her back feels like freedom. They break through the storm clouds and burst into an infinite blue sky, and it is hard to feel insignificant with an eagle lifting you up into open air. 

Flying is better than running, any day.

Marahute’s babies are so much bigger than they once were, grey tufts giving way to soft downy white and streaks of gold. Cody sits with his back pressed against her soft chest, breathes in the smell of the rain, and lets them nip gently at his fingers.

His father gave his life for this. For a world where great beings such as Marahute and her children could live and thrive and grow. He dedicated himself to protecting nature and all her creatures, from the smallest porcupine to the largest emu. He would have loved Marahute, would have adored her, and treated her with the respect she deserves as a living wild thing.

Some of the researchers had asked him where she was, had wanted to study her. Some had even mentioned putting her and her babies into captivity to help repopulate the species, quiet whispered conversations when they thought he hadn’t been listening.

But he had been, and it had struck terror in his throat. For as long as he lives, he never wants this beautiful eagle to ever be captured ever again, no matter how nice her enclosure may be.

Wild things are not meant to be caged. 

He slides the chick off his lap and turns to press himself against soft feathers, and she bends her proud head to ruffle her beak through his hair. It’s just as soothing as his mother’s hand. 

And later, later, when he is being flown home, he presses his lips to her neck and whispers his own meaning into the curve of her spine.

“I’m going to protect you, all of you. I’m going to keep you safe,” he says, and he means it. 

A thousand broken terrible things. A sun meeting an endless horizon and dripping into molten gold: Cody is small and worn and calloused, but he is not yet fully grown. He is finding himself in the way things break, finding himself in the way he puts them back together.

This is his meaning. He curls it into the palms of his hands.

The rain comes pouring down. It washes the world clean.

Cody grows. In spits and starts and bursts of light.

He finds handholds in his own existence, relinquishes his last foothold, and he makes his way through life.

In the early mornings he clambers his way into the wilderness and helps anyone he can reach, swiss army knife in his pocket and a stick at his front to check for traps. When the world presses close he climbs tall ridges in search of open air, eats lunch with Marahute and her babies and watches them grow taller and prouder and more golden with every passing day, watches them stretch their wavering wings and learn how to soar. 

On lazy afternoons he goes out to the village and plays rugby, and late evenings he eats dinner with his mum. He flies through his schoolwork with an intelligent spark and impatient hands, looks out into the world that is full of treacherous wondrous truths and finds significance in the healing of his own hands. 

He will always prefer showers to baths, will always sleep with his knife somewhere in his reach. Sometimes the cold in his bones aches and linger and he curls into himself and struggles to breathe. 

But even scars fade, in time. 

His mother remarries when he’s fifteen, a handsome man with skin like dark riverside stones, the ones that soak up the heat of midday until they are warm and perfect for lazy pythons to sunbathe on. His two daughters are excitable and wild, leaping too and fro and hardly able to wait a moment, bushy hair and shining irises that are just as brilliant as any sunrise. 

Cody takes them out into the wilderness he grew up in, the endless horizons and this cracked earth beneath their feet, teaches them to master tall cliffsides, how to hold a knife, how to treat the creatures who call the outback home with kindness and respect, to treat them as the wild living things they truly are.

They ask him how he got his scars, remnants of rock climbing and sharp claws and metal cages.

He gives a different story every time.

The first day he goes to college, the bumped-up jeep he bought and fixed up himself packed and ready, his sisters cry all morning and his step dad kisses his brow. His mum curls around him and hides her face in his shoulder. 

“What about your breakfast?” she asks, and her voice aches and lightens all at once.

“I have sandwiches in my pack,” he whispers back, and she laughs and pulls him closer.

He does not push her away.

There is an entire world at his feet, endless and brilliant and bright. The horizon stretches on to infinity and he wants to see everything, wants to run and dance graceless in the rain. 

He steps out his front door without a second thought.

Cody plants native prairie grass on his campus to encourage local wildlife, signs petitions for better protection of habitats, writes papers on ecology and nature and endangered species. He looks into biology and zoology and field studies, volunteers at the nature reserve and joins protests lobbying for the protection of all the wild living things. 

He graduates with honours, joins the rangers, and on early mornings he wakes up and heads into the outback, rescues creatures from traps with a swiss army knife in one hand and a stick for checking on pits in the other.

The animals used to speak to him, with words he could hear as clearly as any human. He thinks children have ears made to listen, that the voices are lost as you grow older and your mind more narrowed. Perhaps it was the imagination of a lonely boy, but he still remembers the settling weight of three brave mice in his pocket, Faloo’s worried tone, Frank’s crazed mutterings, and Krebb’s sarcastic responses. 

He remembers, not the words, necessarily, but the  _ voices, _ and sometimes if he concentrates he thinks he can still hear them, an entire world full of life. 

Either way, he doesn’t think even he could make that up.

Over weeks and months and years, he puts together a scientific journal on Australia’s great golden eagles, completed with pictures and recordings and detailed discussion on their importance to the ecosystem, the necessity of their protection from poachers and habitat loss. He goes to the government and rallies support world wide, and a national park is established across Marahute and her children’s territory. 

When people ask  _ how _ and  _ where, _ he smiles, and tells them a different story every time.

But the truth was a cave on the mountain side, where he clambers up great stone cliffs and visits the majestic creature who imprinted sunlight onto his skin when all his days were stormy and grey. She always crows for him and ruffles his hair as if he was still a boy, and he settles against her great chest and eats his lunch, watches the shadows dip into the canyon and paint it in every shade of yellow and browns and gold.

Marahute never speaks, but she never needed to. Her caws of greeting reverberate for miles, on and on and on. Cody laughs, tips his hands into molten sunsets, and lets his own call spring free from his throat, as loud as any thunderous sky.

There is an endlessness to the horizon that does not break. It stretches on into infinity, calling forever to be followed, a thousand dawns and dusks wrapped up into the curved of this warm cracked earth. 

Cody climbs up to meet it, finds himself in the calluses of his own healing hands. He is scarred but not broken, and there is meaning imprinted in the curve of his spine. There is something wild expanding in his chest, grown from long days in the Australian sun and soaring through the clouds on an eagle’s back. 

It tastes like freedom. It tastes like light.

The wild is a dangerous place. You step outside and it carries you away, and you never know when you might come back. Even now, fully grown, he knows that he is but small skin and small bones, a leaf lost in the rapids of time.

But he finds himself in the way the world breathes. He finds himself in warm dirt trapped underneath his fingernails and gentle rufflings of his hair. He finds himself in the echoes of his own existence, the way his voice rings loud and strong and  _ here. _ The animals used to speak to him of an entire world full of life, and he follows that truth and he calls it home.

This will never be nothing.

Cody wakes up in the mornings and greets each sunrise as a better tomorrow. The early dawn paints the earth beneath his feet a molten warmth of gold.

If he closes his eyes and listens, he thinks he can hear nature’s singing. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'd love to chat about how great this movie is! All comments and kudos appreciated <3


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